Today we would like to talk
in the realm of Homiletics. It is appropriate for us to discuss practical
theology because all of you will be in some phase of Christian work.
I have already been asked this question: How do you divide your week in
preparation for your sermons? Perhaps this would be a good place
to start. I have to preach on Sunday morning and on Sunday evening.
I have to preach on Friday night. We call it a lecture, but it is
no different from any other sermon that I preach except that it is a little
bit longer and is more in the form of study than the Sunday morning or
Sunday evening sermons. I also have an exposition of the Sunday School
lesson, the International Uniform Sunday School Lesson, each week which
I give on the radio. That lesson is recorded on Thursday morning,
but it is played over a 50,000 watt station on Sunday morning at 7:35.

A very large listening audience
is served, because there are many people who want a last minute touch for
their Sunday School lesson on Sunday morning. We get responses from
people of all kinds; in fact, I have a Jewish friend who tells me that
every year when he starts playing golf in the spring until the time that
he quits in the fall he leaves at 7:30, turns on the radio, and listens
to my Sunday School lesson. He gets at the Belmont Springs Country
Club at 8 and so he has a Sunday School lesson every Sunday morning.
And he has expressed his appreciation many times. We do not know
how far the broadcast goes; we know it goes a very long distance, but how
many are listening is unknown. Then on Thursday morning I have a
telecast which is live. We speak for a very short message of about
six or seven minutes. It has to be a unified message. We invite,
at the beginning of that message, people to pick up their phones and call
in and express their questions. These questions are then taken right
at the desk before the cameras by my wife. She writes them out and
lays them down, and then after I finish my six-minute or seven-minute message,
whatever it is, I sit down at that desk and begin to answer ad lib
those questions on the Bible, Christ, Christianity, and related subjects
of all kinds.

I have done this now for six
and a half years every Thursday morning, so that this is the program.
Formerly, before I took the telecast, in the evening school of the Bible
I had a lesson every Tuesday night. Because we offer ten courses,
people can take any three of the ten; and we have run this school for twenty-one
years on Tuesday evenings for twenty weeks of the winter season.
We start in October and finish one session before Christmas, start another
one the second week of January and run through about the end of March.
People pay $10 for that. We have had as high as 585 studying in the
school. We average now about two hundred in the school, and I have
taught in that every week for many years.

How do we do this kind of thing?
Well, I always work in the inverse order of unloading my subjects.
I preach without notes, and if you are going to preach without notes you
cannot be confused in what you are doing. I begin to prepare in the
inverse order of which I will dellver these matters. The first thing
I prepare is my Sunday night sermon. And hypothetically I am supposed
to take a day a week off according to the Scripture, and if I take it at
all, that is on Monday. Now there is a very good reason for that.
When you get in the ministry you will find out very few men can take Saturday
off. You find that you rise in your preparation and tensions and
so on to a certain peak, and that comes on Sunday. Naturally you
start here with your thinking and praying and your preparation and, as
everything begins to move, the pressure begins to mount. You are
unloading your various things as you move along, and Sunday is the peak.
Now, if you were going to take Saturday off and totally relax, you would
be down again; then you would have to come back up and pick that up again
on Sunday morning. For me that is practically impossible, because
I have everything in tension built so that I come to Sunday and.finish
off my Sunday. Then I drop to relaxation point on Monday, then start
again on Tuesday morning.

Circumstances are such that
it is impossible sometimes to take a Monday off. We have many things
that interfere, and when they do, there is nothing I can do about it but
submit and carry through on that matter; but I do like to do it in this
order. So what do I do? Tuesday morning I begin immediately
the preparation of the evening sermon, and if I am to keep on schedule,
this should be done on Tuesday. Before I get done with my work on
Tuesday, it should be done. There are the things that interfere:
you have your church calendar, it has to be gotten out; the things that
only the minister can do like choosing hymns, getting the Scripture lesson,
the topics for your sermons, the particular phases in which you want emphasis
in the write-ups in your church calendar--all this has to be done on Tuesday,
and it must be done because it has to go to the printer. And I advise
a man always to keep his hand on his church calendar, because this integrates
the matters of the church activity and emphasis. So this must be done.
Then there is always the gap from Friday night when the secretaries go
home; they are not there until Monday; of course, I am not there till Tuesday
morning. There is a large amount of mail that comes in. Much
of that mail has to be answered by me, so I do that type of thing on Thesday
as well. But I also get to work upon my sermon and will try to get
it done by Tuesday night. Then, when I finish the Sunday night sermon,
I will begin on Wednesday and move into the Friday night message.

Wednesday afternoons we have
a great many interviews. That is the day I meet people with problems,
and sometimes the whole afternoon is consumed. Counseling is exhausting.
I have now Wednesday morning. One morning is not very long in order
to prepare a message, if you are going to have any thing that is very valuable
for your Friday night. Thursday morning is completely gone.
I have there my telecast; I have my recordings for the Sunday School lesson;
I have to prepare the telecast before I give it at 10; and then I go right
from there into the recording and record two Sunday School lessons always,
because, just like today, I am away and or, at least yesterday, I could
not do any recording or have been on telecast because I was away.
So I have to build these up in advance and do two of them. This means
that on Wednesday night and Thursday morning early I am up studying my
Sunday School lesson I am going to give on the radio and the message I
am going to give on the telecast. I get through with that and go
back to the office, and I am there perhaps till right after lunch at 1
p.m. Then I have Thursday afternoon again for study.
So I pick up the remnants now that are involved of such things as the Sunday
night sermon if it is not finished. I try to get that done. Then
I move in to finish whatever is necessary on my Friday night message and
to the Sunday morning message. I attempt always to get that done
by Saturday noon.

I always go to the office on
Saturday early in the morning and work through till I get my sermon.
Now I work until I get through. It does not make any difference whether
it is 12, 1, 2, 3; whatever it is, I work until I finish that sermon, because
we must be on the air; we must preach the next morning, and this has to
be a finished product. Therefore, I work in the inverse order.
Now why? Friday night I present the one that has been prepared last.
Saturday morning I have worked on Sunday morning's sermon. So I present
that on Sunday morning. Then I go back and pick up the one from the
first of the week, get it in mind on Sunday afternoon and give it on Sunday
night. Now, if you are going to preach without notes, you have to
have an order something like this, or you will get into great trouble.
That means that every Saturday night has to be inviolate. We have
to keep it for prayer and for getting in mind the Sunday messages.
I find that to get a message which I have prepared in mind takes approximately
two hours; that is, if I am going to get my outline so that I can see it
so that I can stand up there and forget it (I just forget my outline, forget
everything I have done) and just preach on Sunday morning and Sunday evening.
But this must be in mind and if you dissipate your Saturday night with
youth meetings or picnics or social affairs or any other thing, then it
is impossible to do this adequately and effectively on Sunday. Sometimes
something will interfere, but when it does, I go home after I get through
with whatever this is.

I had to give a speech two
weeks ago on Saturday night at an Armenian Conference, and people came
from all over; and I attended and gave that speech. Then I went home
at 10, and I worked until about 11:30. I was up again the next morning
before 6 and was working on this again in order that I might be able to
maintain the standards of preaching without notes. So much for the
division of work.

Now somebody says, when does
your study come in on this--of other things besides your sermons?
Well, I seize every moment I can take for reading. I have a brief
case here. I carry that brief case with me, and I wear these brief
cases out rapidly, because every place I go I have a brief case.
Now, in that brief case I keep books: books that are long-range books,
books that are short-range books, books that deal with my sermons, books
that are on other subjects. I happen to be one of the editors of
Evangelical books. They send me manuscripts constantly, and I have
got to keep up on those. Some I have to read in detail; some I scan;
some I can tell immediately are not the kind that we want, but it necessitates
quite a lot of reading, too. So I attempt constantly to read.
Take the subway-get a book, sit down and read or stand and read in the
subway going into Boston or in the bus. I leave home usually around
8:30 in the morning. I drop my boy off at school often at 8: 15,
and immediately after that I go to the church. Anywhere from three
to five nights a week I am in the church until 10:30 at night from that
time in the morning. Our home is in the suburbs, and this means that
it is a long, long day for many days during the week. But you must
seize every moment for studying. Take and mark your book so that
you will know where things are (so that they are fastened in your memory),
and then you know where you are going to go and get the particular thing
to which you are going to refer when you do your preparation. So
much for study habits.

When I first get in my office,
if I have not awakened early enough in the morning to take time for my
devotions at home, the very first thing I do is to get into devotions.
Now that means the prayer list which I referred to yesterday. This
goes first in the morning. I cover that, or at least, if I do not
cover it, I take at least a half hour in prayer going over this in order
to keep this matter before me. This starts the day down at the office.

In reading it has been my good
fortune to have a secretary as long as I have been in the ministry.
This happened way back; when I was 25 years of age I had one, and
I have had one ever since. In fact, before, when I was an assistant
minister, I spent part of my salary hiring a secretary for two days a week.
I think this is very, very valuable, because if you mark your books you
do not have time to index all this. But if you have a secretary,
you tell her what she is to do. You have a Wilson file for your topics
and texts of your sermons; you have a Bible with a wide margin; you have
your sermons numbered, and according to the text you put that number down
in the Bible as you go along. You will find that when you want to
talk upon a particular text or upon a particular subject, if you refer
to the subject file of the Wilson index you can immediately have maybe
a dozen things that you have preached on that particular subject in one
angle or another. If you want to talk on a passage of Scripture,
and you refer to the text in your Bible that is of that type, you will
find that you have perhaps a dozen sermons on that one text, in the course
of twenty-five years. I have now a large collection of sermons (the
last sermon I recorded was somewhere around 2,560). Now we have all
of these sermons; so all I would have to do in a moment's time is to look
at the text or that passage of Scripture, and I will find four or five
different sermons on that passage of Scripure. I go to my file right
there at home; I put these things out of the notebook as they are filed
accordmg to numbers which are in accordance with the text. If I have
an International Sunday School Lesson on that text, sometimes I do not
have to do any preparation at all, because I have an exposition of that
passage of Scripture already done very much in detail. I will show
you how we prepare it in a moment. All I have to do is to take that to
the radio station, and in ten minutes time I can give that over the radio
for a twenty-five minute lesson. Now many times I have had to do
it that way because of the pressure of time. So filing is very important.

It will be very important also
for what we may call Theology, Philosophy, and Illustrations. I have
card files in which the topics are put down and the books underneath them
for what I have marked in the margins of these books. So out of a
library of about 6,000 books which are in my own library, I have the oportunity
of going immediately to these various areas of books and finding those
references either to Theology, Philosophy, or History, or whatever it may
happen to be, as illustrations of exactly what I want to say. This
can be done very quickly, but you have to build that kind of thing up.
Now as to the method: If I am going to preach (largely my preaching on
Sunday morning is expository preaching) I take a book of the Bible in which
the text occurs and read that book.

Just now I am preaching through
the book of Matthew. The first thing I did was to read the book of
Matthew a number of times until I was saturated with it. And I continue
doing that the whole time that I am preaching through the book of Matthew.
I have been reading the Gospel of Matthew now for a long time. I
started the series two years ago this coming December 1, and we are now
finishing the twelfth chapter. I have read this book many, many times
during that period. The next thing I do is go and and read it through
in the Greek (the whole book through in the Greek) in order that I may
be conversant with all the aspects of the Greek. There are lights
that are given to you in the original that you do not get any other way.
The next thing I do is outline that book.

Matthew is the treatment of
Christ from the viewpoint of being the King. So you have the descent
of the King; the birth of the King; the first sermon that starts the series
can be called "The Descent of the King," if you please. Then "The
Birth of the King"; then "The Herald of the King"; "The Inauguration
of the King" (at the time of His baptism); "The Temptation of the
King"; "The Subjects of the King"; "The Charter of the Kingdom";
"The Certification of His Kingly Authority"; "The Beginning of the
Rejection of the Kingship" (in its incipient form); "The Controversy
Between the King and the Kingly People" (the Israelites and their rejection
of Him). This becomes an outline that is in your mind. No matter
what you deal with along this book, you fasten it within the whole outline
itself, and you know exactly where you are at any moment.

Now to illustrate that, I take
as a result of this method a particular passage of Scripture. I use
a complete unit in the Scripture, never just a running comment that is
an exposition or just commenting on the Scripture. Exposition is
taking a block of truth which would ordinarily be a paragraph. It
could be one single verse, one sentence, or it could be one word, if you
wish so to do in detail. I usually take a block and preach on that
whole thing at once, so much so that I could pick that up this morning
on any of those particular topics and use it as a message here. It
would be apropos; it would be complete; it would be an absolute unit; it
would be independent of any other part of the exposition of the book of
Matthew. This is a complete independent unit. But if you are
sitting under this ministry over a period of time, you will find that it
adds precept upon precept and line upon line. The concept grows,
and it gives you a full exposition of Scripture; and you will have a much
deeper understanding thereof as a result of it. Now in taking such
an individual passage, the first thing is to find a unit in the Scripture
which is a total unit, a complete thought (a paragraph or whatever it happens
to be), and this means inductive Bible study.

You do not take what somebody
else has voiced upon the Scripture. You study the Scripture itself,
ascertain where that paragraph, that unit of thought is, what the content
of that is as the main thrust of it. You form your topic from the
main thrust of what that particular unit of thought is. Some other
expositor might do it a different way, but for me the greatest amount of
time is now spent on understanding this particular unit of divine revelation.
And I may spend hours just working on the outline of that, getting the
expression of exactly what this thought is because in my opinion this is
what God gives to me. This is that which is to be mediated through
the prism of my personality, before I consult with anybody else to find
out what he has to say. When I get through with my own outline of
this then I am willing to go beyond and get other things. But let
us pause a moment on just that matter of an outline.

An outline is extremely important
in preaching, if you are going to preach without notes. Let us take
the text (the last one we had in our own exposition in Matthew) in Matthew
12 and just use it as an illustration. The Lord Jesus there in the
twelfth chapter said this (let us take this passage from the thirty-third
to the thirty-seventh verses, that is a unit). In 12:33 "Either make
the tree good, and its fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and its
fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by its fruit. 0 generation of
vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For out of the
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the
good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man
out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. But I say unto
you, that every idle word men shall speak, they shall give account thereof
in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified,
and by thy words thou shalt be condemned."

This is a complete unit of
thought. What is the central thing there? I used as the text
the thirty-fifth verse, "A good man out of the good treasure of the heart
bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth
forth evil things." Now what would I call that? The word treasure
is the word Thesauros. What is Thesauros? You
have a Thesaurus on your desk. It is a repository of words, synonyms,
antonyms and so on of words. The Lord says you have a Thesauros.
This whole thing deals with words, deals with judgment by words, deals
with all the things that come out of the mouth, as out of the abundance
of the heart the mouth speaketh. This is everything now about words.
The Lord says you have a Thesauros. I have my topic from that.
I called it "The Treasury", the Christian treasury; and this is what it
is. Now, in a way of introduction, shall we look at this a moment.

Here we have this word treasury,
Thesauros, and there are immediately several things involved here.
When you want to take the word treasury or Thesauros it can mean
two things: it can mean the repository itself, the treasury into which
you put precious things, or it can mean the treasure that you put into
the treasury. So in your introduction, what do you do? You
take it first that the word treasury is a repository. This repository
is the human nature. Repositdry of the human nature is what? Freud
calls it the Id, and down into the Id, he says, you have
as much as the nine tenths of an iceberg that does not show. Only
one-tenth is seen; the rest is here within and all this has been pressed
down and suppressed and pushed into this Id. The psychiatrist
has to reach down in here to get these, because out of this volcano come
the tensions and all the things that express themselves outside.
So Freud would say it is the Id; Calvin would say the depraved human
rature; David Hume would say that it is simply a blank tablet. There
was nothing there except what you put in from the outside. William
Kilpatric and John Dewey, of the expressionist school of Columbia University,
would say that it's entirely good here and that the only kind of corruption
comes from without. Whatever you think about it, the treasury is
this business which we call ourselves. The whole sum total and what
we put into there goes into the treasury of ourself.

The Lord says you have
this Thesauros. There is also a treasure that goes into it;
and this might be violent experiences, disappointing, frustrating experiences,
hates; then, on the other hand, it might be delightful, beautiful, lovely
things that we put within. They all go within the treasury.
Everything of our past goes in there. They tell us we forget nothing--absolutely
nothing--and there can be brought forth from the earliest years of life
the influence of these things that have gone into the treasury of a human
nature. The Lord says you have this treasury, and you have been putting
things into it all of your life, and you are putting into it now.
So here is your introduction. Then you get the particular theme that
He is talking about here, and that theme is words. You go next into
the analogy of Scripture on this; take, for instance, in Matthew 7 where
he says so much about words-by your fruits ye shall know. "Beware
of false prophets for they are wolves in sheep's clothing." They
speak to you nice things, but, after all, they are trying to deceive you.

There is an analogy.
When James speaks about the things that come out from the human heart,
some things good and some bad, he compares it to a fountain out of which
come both bitter and sweet water. So you take the analogous Scripture
in here. Now you have your introduction; that is necessary. By that
time you have your people with you; you have the college students there,
and they are thinking about Freudianism, about John Calvin, about the Expressionists
and the Naturalists of the Columbia School of Education. They are
thinking about all these things, but they are also thinking about their
own hearts at the moment. Then what do you do? You take this
passage of Scripture and you ask, "Now what is the thing that is being
talked about here?" It is the principle of Christian ethics applied
to words. This is the subject on which I am going to talk: "Out of
the abundance of the heart man speaketh." This immediately rings
a bell in my mind that says in references to Proverbs, for instance, that
out of the heart are the issues of life. "Keep thy heart with all
diligence."

What do we have first of all?
We have the heart as the potential repository of man's life. It is
like a reservoir, a great reservoir out of which comes everything.
I compared it to the Quaben Reservoir of Boston. If you contaminate
the Quaben Reservoir all through the conduits and the pipes and the faucets,
then all through our buildings and homes and everything we would have contaminated
water. What happens if we have a contaminated heart? Everything
we do with our feet, our hands, our eyes, our ears, and everything we have,
are contaminated because the source is contaminated. And then with
this discussion of contamination of the heart I leaped over to Zurich,
Switzerland. You remember the event last year in Zurich, Switzerland.
They allowed the water supply to become contaminated (in this wonderful
resort), and some four hundred people took typhus and several died.
It brought a question mark over all of the things in Switzerland, because
they allowed this source to become contaminated. The Scripture says
our hearts are contaminated. In all the things the Scripture says
and the analogy of the Scripture, you have a vast area.

Then I moved into another territory
which spoke about the product of the heart. If you go over two chapters
of Scripture into the fifteenth chapter, what do you find? The Lord
says, "that which goeth into the mouth does not defile a man, it is that
which goeth out of a man's mouth." He said out of the heart come
adulteries, fornications, thefts, violence and all these things that He
mentions. So the product of your mouth is the product of the heart.
Now what are you bringing forth out of your heart? That is the deep
thing. "Out of the abundance of the heart a man speaketh."
(1) Out of the heart are the issues of life. (2) Out of the heart come
either the things that defile or make a man clean. (3) Because the
heart is going to be filled with something, you never have an empty heart.
The very next thing goes on to say that a man reformed his heart, and the
spirit went out; and it was empty and garnished and clean, but it was empty.
Then he brought back seven spirits more wicked than himself and filled
that heart. You are never going to have an empty heart; something
is going to be in there. If it is not filled with the Spirit, filled
with God's Word, filled with the truth, if it is not the treasury of God,
it is going to be something else. So you have here, first of all, a principle
of Christian ethics.

I go from that into the next
thing of the text: "By their fruits ye shall know them, for a tree is known
by its fruits." This is number two: the perception of Christian experience.
You have had the principle that Christian ethics comes from the heart;
then you have the perception of Christian experiences. Does a man
have such an experience or not? "By the fruit ye shall know them,
a tree is known by its fruits." You do not pick grapes from thistles
and figs from vines, and so by the heart. You have consistency versus
hypocrisy. There is a consistency here. Out of a good heart
man produces good things; out of an evil heart man produces evil things.
But what about the ones in which you have an inconsistency which is hypocrisy?
There is such a thing as stimulation, and some people do stimulate Christian
virtues for a false testimony.

But what about the one who
is startled when he is a Christian because evil comes out of his heart
or shocked with some of the things he says and thinks and does? This
will happen to a Christian. Here you get a situation of bondage in
a Christian life that ought not to be, for the Scripture says that a man
shall be known by his fruit. A Christian should be known by the words
that he speaks. That brings you automatically into the third point,
the prospect of Christian extrication from such a condition of conflict.
You have the principle of Christian ethics; you have the perspective of
Christian experience; you have then the prospect of Christian extrication
or deliverance. When you say to yourself, "Well, why? why?"
This is because a man who is involved in this conflicting experience of
carnality is a miserable Christian. You could have happiness if you
are all out for the devil (Now I am not going into this, but this is Biblical.);
you can have happiness if you are all out for God. But the most miserable
person in the world is the person who is half and half and cannot do what
he wants to do because he does not have the sanction or desire and duty
coinciding within his own life. He is in conflict all the time.
So why? why? Because we need to be delivered from this; we need to
be extricated from that condition. How are we going to be extricated?
Go to the sixth chapter of Romans. What do you find there?
By identification with Jesus Christ in death by burial, by identification
with Jesus Christ in resurrection life, by a release of the Holy Sprit
inhabiting one's individual life producing the fruit of the Spirit.
Here is the means of extrication. If you go back into the last passage,
you will find that the Lord has been talking about unpardonable sin; and
the unpardonable sin begins within our own words, and it moves on into
our attitude. It goes on from a deed to a destiny. If we reject
the ministry and witness of the Holy Spirit as to the person and work of
Jesus Christ, this becomes the unpardonable sin for an individual.

We have the possibility constantly
of grace in order for the Lord to deliver us, but we have the guilt which
comes from the present work of our sin and the evidence of this in our
life. The gravity of this is that it can lead to the unpardonable
sin. And so, what do we have? We have the great teaching of
our Lord Jesus Christ that we should in turn keep our hearts with all diligence,
that out of the heart comes the depth of life, the issues of life.

This is what we call an expository
sermon. All through here when I talk about Freud and these different
things, where do those things come from? They either came out of
memory or they came when I consulted my file by way of illustrative material
within certain phases of life along this line. Last Sunday I preached
on "The Sign of the Messiah", which was from verses 38-42; the next one
will be 43-45, which will be on the fact of either reformation or regeneration.
That will be the subject, the natural, the only subject you could have,
if you preach on that text. I will be working on that this afternoon.
I must get my own outline first of all. I work on that most diligently
to have alliteration. You can remember your outline readily because
of all these things that are alliterative. Now, if you get that in
your mind once, and you stand up and preach this before a people, you do
not have to worry about having notes and be constantly looking at them;
you will be constantly looking at the eyes of the people; you will be getting
the response of men, you will know exactly how they are feeling, and the
Lord will be leading you in different channels because of your own reaction
to the people as you preach. There will be an infinite area that
will open up to your own mind that will flash across your mind from your
past experience because you are free from notes.

The first thing is alliteration; the second thing
is logic. Perhaps you did not notice that this outline as far as
its logical development was: (1) the principle of Christian ethics,
(2) the perception of Christian experience, (3) the possibility of Christian
extrication. On that Sunday morning I went to the door to stand in
the back and was shaking hands with these people. There came a student
from Harvard; he said to me, "I just want to thank you for one I thing."
I said, "What's that?" He said, "For your use of logic." Now maybe
nothing else had appealed to him in that whole sermon, but here was a student
at Harvard, and logic caught his eye. He will come back because he
thinks at least his preacher is logical. "I may not believe what
he says, but what he says is logical; I have to listen to him." So
you use logic. And you use this development of a theme. When
you develop a theme you cannot go anywhere else, when you get through with
the first, but to the second. It is impossible to go to the third
one because you would have a gap. The most natural thing in the world,
when I finish with this one on Christian ethics, is to reach under the
perception of Christian experiences; a man has this or he does not have
it. What is he producing? What is coming forth from your life?

After I get this outline, I
go to the critical commentaries which deal with the subject in the original
language. You should always have these in your library, because you
have made a mistake. You may make a mistake in a subjective or objective
genitive; you may make a mistake in many ways and it may affect the whole
content of your sermon. So you should go to the critical commentaries
to see if you are right. If there is anything you have wrong or anything
you have missed, you will find it there. When you finish with the
critical commentaries, if you still need help, go to the practical commentaries
(we get whole scads of them being published today, and then old ones of
Maclaren, Robertson, Parker, and so on down the list). You have all
kinds of these practical commentaries. Then get your illustrations.
Now when I am all done with that, then I re-outline the whole thing.
I re-outline it because usually it is not in the order that I want it exactly,
and it has to be changed.

The last thing I do, if there
is time, is to dictate that. Now for fifteen years I have dictated
all of my messages, Sunday morning and Sunday night. They are still
in the file-I never use them any more but they are there. And it
developed a style after fifteen years. Today I do not dictate because
I do not have time. Today everything is recorded on a tape machine
so that if we need to publish it, or somebody calls in a question over
the radio, we have a tape; and it can be typed up within a couple of hours
just as we have it. We have a whole library of the sermons in the
Book of Matthew on tape now. This keeps a background of the whole
thing. It gives you the methodology that is involved. Now time
is running out; just let me say this--this is only one method of sermonizing.
This is expository preaching, and this is what the brother asked me to
specifically emphasize this morning. I use all kinds of messages.
Now when I went into "The Herald of the King," which is a passage in the
third chapter of Matthew, I used a biographical sermon.

Biographical sermons are really
very wonderful sermons to preach. I enjoy them to the full.
So this was John the Baptist, "The Herald of the King." You may study
his life geographically if you want to; you may study it topically, and
so on. I studied it from taking the third chapter, the eleventh chapter,
and the thirteenth chapter of Matthew--the three chapters which deal with
John's life--together. And so I called it "The Herald of the King".
(1) There was the apex of his career; that would be chapter three where
he is preaching the great message, where he is preparing the people, bringing
them to baptism, pronouncing the coming of the Lord, the message of the
Messiah, the change of dispensation, the divine love, justice and all these
things involved. It was a tremendous time like Billy Graham's meetings
that he is holding now, like in Los Angeles, where he had 150,000 people.
John had them come from everywhere--see the apex of his career.

Then we have (2) the apex of
his character. That came when he said "he must increase and I must
decrease." If ever there was a dirty dig that anybody ever gave anybody,
the disciples of the Pharisees gave it to John when they said, "Rabbi,
He to whom thou bearest witness with beyond Jordan now baptizest and all
men go unto him-" just like saying to a man who used to be popular, "Look,
doctor so-and-so across the street is getting all the crowds today.
What happened to you?" What did John say? "He must increase,
I must decrease." Oh, you spend some time on that. Here are
some of the greatest spiritual laws in the whole Bible: spiritual law of
inverse proportion, spiritual law of gravitation.

There is the third one which
is (3) the apex of his courage. When did that come? Why,
he upbraided the lion in his own den. To Herod he said, "It is not
lawful for thee to have her." And her anger was in motion, and she
fumed, and Herod put him in prison. He would have killed him, but
he feared the people till the day came when Salome danced and he said she
could have anything, even the half of the kingdom; and they beheaded John
the Baptist. What do you have? You have a comet that sweeps
across the sky. You have the morning star disappearing before the
rising sun. You have the greatest that was born of woman, but He
that is in the Kingdom of God is greater than he. It is biographical,
but it is still expository as a whole. Now you come to the sixth
chapter or the fifth chapter, and what do you have? Chapters five,
six and seven in Matthew are "The Charter of the Kingdom," and here you
will come into a topical sermon. When you take a topical sermon like
"The Charter of the Kingdom," what do you have? You have chapter
five. If time permitted this morning, we would show you a whole scene:
Jesus on the Horns of Hattin with the disciples close above him.
Outside of them were the multitudes that came from Judea and Samaria and
beyond Jordan. Everywhere they had come to hear him-tremendous multitudes
out into the mountains-the mountain where the Crusaders were defeated by
Saladin. He broke the power of the kingdom of the Crusaders so that
they had to give up the kingdom they had held and depart from Palastine.
It all happened in that same place. And whom was he teaching?
He was teaching the disciples, it says. Not the multitude, the disciples.
When He was set the disciples came and He talked to them. What did
He teach? He taught about the law, the Old Testament law. The whole
Sermon on the Mount was there. And He opens it up and He shows them
how the Pharisees and their teaching were wrong and that the teaching of
the law had an inner meaning that was totally different from anything they
had brought out about it before. In chapter five you have the attitude.
Now I am not going to be able to give you all this, but let me go over
it quickly.

If you analyze the fifth chapter
of Matthew, you find first of all that there is a spiritual phase of it,
the entrance into the kingdom. Then there is the social relationship
between man as the light of the world and the salt of the earth.
And this is what we are today. Then there is the legal--that their
righteousness had to be greater than the righteousness of the Scribes and
the Pharisees. Then there was the personal--that if an individual
had anything against another he had to make it right. Then there
was the moral--driving it into the heart--in which he said if you look
upon a woman to lust after her you have committed adultery in your heart.
Then there was the cultural--that dealt with the language, "Let your communication
be yea, yea, and nay, nay and whatsoever is more . . . " Then there
was the ethical--go the second mile. Then there was the filial--ye
are the sons of God; therefore, "be ye perfect even as your father which
is in heaven is perfect." All this comes in here, the seven things,
in the attitude of an individual--that which is internal, that which is
the experience that a Christian ought to have in the charter of the kingdom.
And you never come into the kingdom unless you come by way of spiritual
teaching of the beatitudes. This is the door by which we come into the
kingdom. Then you come here and you have the action. And when
you deal with action in the sixth chapter, it is action of life in God's
presence. A man is living in the presence of God, his fasting, his
alms, his prayers, these are not to be for the view of men; these are to
be seen of God, that is all. "And he that seeth you in secret will
reward you openiy," says the Scripture. And then it goes on and speaks
about anxiety of the heart, and it speaks about the possession of material
things.

Two other things in that chapter
are to be dealt with: (1) "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness and all these things will be added unto you." (2) "You
can not serve God and Mammon;" you must make a choice. Their anxieties
are to be removed from the heart. Internal anxieties and external
relationships are there. All this comes under action that is lived
underneath the aegis of God.

In the seventh chapter you
have admonition. What does he say in the admonitions? "Beware
of those who are wolves in sheep's clothing." He says, "By their
fruits ye shall know them." He says, "Not everyone that saith unto
me Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom but he that doeth the will of my
Father which is in heaven," and so I might go on these admonitions that
are given to you there. Now here is the way to remember the Sermon
on the Mount. This should be one sermon, on a Sunday morning, and
then go back and take each one of these things one by one--the spiritual,
the personal, the social, the legal, the personal, the cultural, the ethical,
the filial, each one of these along the line--preach a message on each
one of them.

If you want another topical
one that is combined exposition, take the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
chapters of Matthew. There you have Jesus' discourse on last things: magnificent
preaching, sermons that I love to preach on the Second Coming. There are
the terrifying things which do not signify the end (we live in an age in
which people are terrified) and then the things that do signify the age,
and He gives you four of them: (1) The return of Israel to Palestine,
the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews; (2) The reign of fear in
the hearts of people; (3) A revolution among the nations; (4)
Recognizable signs in the sun, moon, and the stars. He says when
you see these you know the time is at hand. We see the revolution
in the nations while we have fifty-three new nations in the United Nations
in the last two or three years. We see all these things taking place,
the reign of fear taking place in the hearts of men today; but we have
not seen yet the signs in the sun, moon, stars. But it could happen
now with space travel and with atomic fission and with our explosion of
these things off in space. These things could take place, and He says when
that takes place there is going to be a generation living, when you see
these things come to pass. Then He says when that generation is living,
look out, look up, lift up your heads, prepare yourself, keep yourself.
And here you have a great expository study which becomes prophetic preaching,
and yet it is out of the exposition of a book.

This illustrates the fact that
you can take one particular book of Scripture and out of that book, if
you study it, work on it, you have just about every kind of preaching.
You have doctrinal preaching, biographical preaching, chapter preaching,
you can have book preaching, you can have subject preaching and so on and
on. Let a chapter show how you can do chapter preaching. The
eighth chapter of Romans, freedom chapter--freedom from condemnation, freedom
from physical temptations, freedom from insecurity, freedom from suffering,
and so on down the line in the eighth chapter of Romans. Take the
twenty-third chapter of Isaiah. You have seven areas in which it
speaks about how our Lord has delivered us--the great deliverance chapter.
Take the second chapter of Ephesians, which gives us the magnificent reaches
of restoration of the individual soul in regeneration unto God: how he
is no longer an alien, how that by grace he has been reconciled.
No longer dead, now he is quickened, now he is in the covenant family of
God. He was an alien, now he is a member of the household of faith.
He is inhabited by the Holy Spirit. You take those tremendous chapters
and each one can be a great message and unit in itself.

One last word because time
is gone. I learned a lesson when I was a student in college.
I had a much older man who was with us in an evangelistic team. He
used to come to me and just about drive me crazy sometimes. I would
work hard on a sermon and preach and he would tell me afterward:
"Ockenga, You don't know how to preach." He would say, "You didn't
give a message, you gave a Bible reading." And I never knew what
he meant. And then one day I had a deep spiritual experience.
I took passages of Scripture that related this and worked it out in accordance
with the truth that was involved and presented it. He came to me
afterward and said, "That is the first time I have ever heard you have
a message." And there is a difference. There is a difference
between having a Bible reading, getting up and just telling people a few
things that are pretty and beautiful and true and all the rest of it; and
having a message in which you drive something home to them that they can
make their own and a spiritual life that becomes their own. And if
a sermon does not have that, it is no sermon.

Remember what Jesus did at
Nazareth. It says he opened the Scripture. He said, "This day
is the scripture fulfilled in your ears." They said: "Is not this
the son of Joseph? Are not his sisters and brothers here? Whence
then hath he these words of wisdom?" They caught their breath in
holy awe when Jesus preached to them in Nazareth. That is the way
we ought to preach. We should preach with the Spirit of the Lord
upon us. We should preach, communicating unto the people the message
that God has given for their salvation, for their security, their deliverance,
their freedom, their sonship, their heirship with God, their eternal destiny.
We must communicate every time we preach a message for their soul.
And if we do well, this is preaching by an Evangelistes who is a
hearid of the Evangelion, which is the content of the Gospel committed
by God to His ambassadors to proclaim throughout the world.